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In the Blink of an Eye

June 15, 2018 by  
Filed under blog

I’m sure that we’ve all had moments in our life when suddenly our brains provide an answer to a question we’ve been struggling with. Maybe it was as simple as a name of a person that we couldn’t remember or a great creative or business investment idea that popped into our head when we were thinking about something totally different. It can happen in the blink of an eye.

How about when you meet someone new and in that blink of an eye you know and feel in that instant that this new person is not a good person.  I will never forget being told by a friend that a guy he’s known for years had a great investment opportunity that I needed to get into. Then, wow, when I met the guy I knew, within a blink of an eye, that he couldn’t be trusted. Sure enough, my friend and several others lost hundreds of thousands of dollars as this guy, that my brain told me couldn’t be trusted, took off with their money.  The only good part of all of that was that the guy was caught later in a foreign country and is now sitting in a California prison and will be for many years to come.

In a great little book titled Blink, Malcolm Gladwell makes a very convincing case that our subconscious brains are so very good at giving us instant, and often times, very accurate feedback to all kinds of life, business and personal situations. Gladwell says, “The part of the brain that leaps to conclusions like this is called the ‘adaptive unconscious’, and the study of this kind of decision making is one of the most important new fields in psychology.  The adaptive unconscious is not to be confused with the unconscious described by Sigmund Freud.”

Next week I want to talk more about the great power of listening to the instant feedback that our adaptive unconscious gives us. I’ll give you some of the details concerning a 10-million-dollar deal that long, hard expert research said was a good and genuine opportunity but that the adaptive unconscious of several people indicated it was a phony deal, and they were right. In the meantime, don’t forget to “trust your gut” because most of the time your gut gets it right in the “blink of an eye”.